Nuclear Dawn, the FPS-RTS hybrid Source mod turned (maybe) commercial title, had all got a bit hazy of late. What was going on with it? We hadn’t even posted about it in two years. Two years! Anyway, we’ve just received word that post-apocalyptic project is getting a release in September (definitely!) The game is a multiplayer mix of FPS and RTS, with folks able to take on the roles of RTS-style commander, or one of four classes on the battlefield. As I understand it the two factions differ in how their bases work, with their team loadouts being roughly symmetrical. The new announcement also claims that the game will be packed with all the trappings of modern multiplayer, with unlocks, 60 ranks, squad-functionality, and Steamworks-based cloud configs and character stuff. It will kick off with six maps and 32-player servers. Not 32 player servers. Obviously.

Hope it’ll be good. The last few screens they’ve released on their moddb/indiedb page are pretty sweet looking, better than the trailer from the looks of it. Still, it’ll come down to how it plays, not how it looks.

It’s on the Coming Soon tab in the Steam store so I imagine it’s gone commercial.
I’m still feeling burned from Brink so I don’t think I’ll be dropping cash for this until way after release and it’s picked up good word of mouth.

For whoever actually cares: This game used to be a partial rip off of the crappy yet extremely entertaining Empires hl2 mod. But then the Nuclear Dawn team decided not to have vehicles, so now the game will inevitably suck even more than it would have. Empires, on the other hand, is a very unpolished six year old mod that almost never has had more than two and a half developers actively working on it that nevertheless has tanks.

I remember picking up this mod, oh what was it, 5 years ago? I loved the concept art.
I believed it joined the mod graveyard together with with Hidden:Source, Sourceforts, GoldenEye:Source, Insect Infestation, Iris, Substance, Perfect Dark: Source, Zombie Master, Troy, Iron Grip: The Oppression, Eternal Silence and many more.

Well, it’s nice that it did not join this graveyard. I hope that it will be more playable than Empires. I’m not saying that Empires is not playable, but it has a lot of bugs and glitches and the hit detection is horrible.